Featured Artist Hilal Khaniyev

Artist Hilal Khaniyev weaves fantasy, mythology, literature and travel into her charming figurative paintings. Visit her website to see more.

 

 

I’ve always felt like I live between worlds. I was born in Trabzon, a coastal city along the Black Sea in northern Turkey. My life since has been a kind of quiet migration.

 

 

From Turkey to the UAE, to eleven long years in Finland, I now live in the misty calm of Kirkland, Washington. Somewhere along the way, I stopped belonging to one place and began belonging to many. That sense of movement is at the heart of my art.

 

 

I come from a long line of women who made beauty by hand. My grandmother embroidered intricate patterns, and my mother painted luminous florals that filled our home with color and scent. I grew up watching her work, transfixed by how something as simple as pigment and light could hold a soul.

 

 

For years, I went a different direction, into data, analytics, and research, a world of structure and precision. But art never left me. It sat quietly in the corner of my life until I could no longer ignore it. When I finally returned, it felt like breathing again.

 

 

My paintings are moody, emotional, and a little haunted. I’ve always been drawn to darkness, not in despair, but in the way a candle feels more sacred when surrounded by shadow. I love the mystery of it, the full moon, a stormy sea, the flicker of a lantern in the wind. That’s the atmosphere I live for. I think it comes from the fantasy stories my mother used to tell me as a child. They are the stories that made me fall in love with witches, goddesses, and faraway worlds.

 

 

I still chase that feeling of wonder. Maybe that’s why I love Autumn so much with its sense of suspended magic. I’m endlessly inspired by gothic literature. by Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, by the idea of standing on a cliffside as the wind howls through.

 

 

I remember reading under a blanket with a flashlight in my grandmother’s village, the room smelling of baked bread and rain. I’m still that girl, curious about how humans once lived, convinced that even across centuries, we’ve always felt the same things: love, longing, fear, hope.

 

 

I even carry that fascination on my skin. A tattoo of an Egyptian goddess is a tribute to my childhood obsession with mythology. I believe we shouldn’t be intimidated by the darkness, by the negative spaces. They’re what make us human. My art is a reminder that even in the dark, there’s light waiting to be seen. Wonder, once found, never truly leaves us.

 

Hilal Khaniyev invites you to follow on Instagram.

 

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